Sports clubs are running billboards that are quite expensive

It is common to see large sports brands jostling for the right to pay dearly to brand their brands in the uniforms of the world’s big clubs and teams. Astronomical values, in dozens of homes, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars. Why pay so much money to have the right to produce and market club products? T-shirt sales are something to consider, of course, but it’s still far from explaining why the big ones, like Nike and Adidas, the two biggest on the market, are so strong to be in the top teams in the world.

The importance of sponsoring good clothes, which have visibility, is evident in the case in Nike’s history. Until the 1990s, this company had a strong brand throughout the world, but hardly played in football. This strategy to change explains the many meanings of sports supply contracts. Nike is almost inactive in the biggest sport in the world. There is a series of small products made in Mexico for a small community of Americans who practice soccer, but it’s almost crazy. When we want to enter the world of sports, we must be associated with global brands.

Brazil was the first big choice invested by an American company at that time. In 1997, CBF traded Umbro with Nike for a $ 160 million 10-year contract, the largest of a team at that time. The brand also sponsors some of the biggest Brazilian stars of the time, such as Ronaldo and Romário.

In a market dominated by Adidas, Nike needs a strong contract. Since 1997, there have been other choices, such as the Netherlands, South Korea and Portugal, but Brazil has always been the company’s flagship as a way of publishing the brand. Only with this data, you can measure the size of the visibility given by the Brazilian team shirt to Nike. But we can also take numbers. The company’s turnover with soccer until 1998 was $ 40 million. In 2013, it closed at $ 1.9 billion. In 2012, it exceeded US $ 2 billion. 2013 brought another important change: Brazil passed Britain and Japan among countries with the highest company turnover. It is only behind the United States and China, the two largest economies in the world.

What can we conclude?

A country’s reputation, in this case Brazil, can make companies pay for publication. This is certainly not limited to football but also in other sports such as baseball, tennis, basketball and so on. In the context of football, the football jerseys are running billboards, exposed to 365 days a year. This is the cool shirt that the man uses in ballads, in the game. Money spent on sponsoring clubs is included in the account as a marketing fee. Basically, publications require successful attention; in football we have Brazil or France, in the NBA we have the Los Angeles Lakers or Chicago Bulls and in tennis, we have Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal.